Leading Pay TV provider selects Imagine Communications to manage cross-media advertising

Imagine Communications, a market leader of media software and video infrastructure solutions serving the global broadcast, multichannel video programming distributor and enterprise markets, today announced a major enhancement to the Landmark™ Sales system at Sky Media, the advertising sales division of BSkyB. The enhancement will allow Sky Media to bring its video-on-demand (VoD) services, on both the set top box and digital platform, onto its existing linear advertising system, helping to simplify campaign planning and minimise duplicated effort.

Sky Media has been one of the largest users of Landmark media software for nearly a decade. The company’s existing Landmark system supports airtime sales across more than 200 linear TV channels and handles over 25 million advertising spots each year. The new contract between Sky Media and Imagine Communications not only enables the extension of this relationship until at least 2020, but also adds the capability for the system to manage all of its VoD inventory. By migrating these processes onto the Landmark platform, Sky Media is able to reduce complexity in day-to-day operations as well as provide a significant cost saving.

“We will now be able to use Landmark as a single point of data entry, which means we can offer advertisers cross-platform campaigns and execute them efficiently,” said Jeff Eales, Director Systems Development at Sky Media. “It also means the technology platform will match the way our sales team is organised. Our television and digital efforts can be closely aligned, delivering real benefits for the organisation.”

In addition to aligning the operations of the sales team, the system provides easier reporting and analysis because all revenue is managed via one system. Key data such as clearance and copy processing is entered and stored only once, and tracking compliance and asset management are improved. The software’s enhanced capabilities to manage across media types allow Sky Media to avoid the cost of constructing another data warehouse.

“The sales team at Sky Media can be more dynamic, proactive and effective because they can build cross-platform campaigns simply and accurately,” said Steve Reynolds, Chief Technology Officer at Imagine Communications. “Landmark continues to deliver advanced impression-based capabilities and now adds to that the ability to manage on-demand and digital content. Our platform provides Sky Media with access to rich management accounting information, now with all the data in a single, simple dashboard. As a result of the cross-media capabilities in Landmark, Sky Media saves significantly by not incurring licence fees for a second system, they see operational benefits in data storage and protection, and they can optimize technical and operational support.”

The Landmark Sales platform for linear and nonlinear broadcasting will be demonstrated at IBC2014 (Amsterdam, 12 – 16 September) as part of Imagine Communications’ presentation on an integrated, IP-centric broadcast future. Imagine can be seen at stand 7.G20.

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About Imagine Communications

Imagine Communications empowers the media and entertainment industry through transformative innovation. Broadcasters, networks, video service providers and enterprises around the world rely on our optimized, futureproof, multiscreen video and revenue enablement solutions every day to support their mission-critical operations. Today, nearly half of the world’s video channels traverse our products, and our software solutions drive close to a third of global ad revenue. Through continuous innovation, we are delivering the most advanced IP, cloud-enabled, software-defined network and workflow solutions in the industry. Visit www.imaginecommunications.com for more information, and follow us on Twitter @imagine_comms.